China web company Baidu to launch self driving car to rival Google

Emulating tech giant Google’s example, a leading Chinese web firm will launch its own self driving car later this year.

Baidu, a Chinese web services company, will work with a third party automobile manufacturer to launch the driver-less car based on computer technology and artificial intelligence, said Senior Vice President of the firm Wang Jin at the China Cloud Computing Services Summit.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming a key battleground for tech firms, with self-driving cars seen as one of the first practical applications for the technology. Baidu’s rise in the field of artificial intelligence suffered a setback last week when Stanford University -which runs an AI test to see whether computers can recognise and sort images – banned Baidu from competing for the next year.

The web giant was stripped of its 2015 title after it emerged that it broke the rules over how many tests it could run.

A series of technologies such as the big data, Baidu Map, artificial intelligence and Baidu Brain will be applied on the self-driving car, state-run People’s Daily online reported today.

In addition, based on computer technology and artificial intelligence, Baidu Brain can simulate the thinking mode of the human brain. With 20 billion parameters, Baidu Brain can store information and “think”, it said.

Previously, in order to enhance the accuracy of Baidu Map, Baidu acquired a Finnish technology company. The announcement comes in the backdrop of Google conducting the trials of its driver-less car in the US.

In the future, the comparison between the self-driving cars of Baidu and Google will probably be a hot topic.